CT budget committee approves bill charging for redacted police videos

The legislature’s budget committee voted unanimously to allow police to charge fees for redacting video from police cameras.

While police and municipalities have been able to charge fees for public records for years, the rapidly growing use of body and dashboard cameras has opened up a new world of public information that is available.

The volume of videos is large as thousands of police officers across the state in 169 cities and towns are now required under state law to wear body cameras.

Under the bill, the police could charge a maximum of up to $100 per hour for the working time of the officials to comply with freedom of information requests.

Police would be able to charge for “the hourly salary attributed to all agency employees engaged in providing the requested record, including their time performing necessary formatting or programming functions, but not including search or retrieval costs,” a nonpartisan bill summary says. ”They can also charge for the cost of an outside professional electronic copying service, if needed.”

The main group pushing for the bill is the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, which represents municipal departments across the state. The chiefs say that some departments need to hire more staff to handle the requests, adding that no structure was put in place to collect fees in a multi-step process of reviewing extensive video and making redactions to avoid showing minors or potential invasions of privacy in medical cases.

“For example, a simple video that is short in duration with little or no redactions may take an hour or two to review, redact, and reproduce onto a disc or thumb drive to provide to a requestor,” the chiefs said in written testimony. “On the other hand, an incident that has multiple recordings from several officers, and contains images that are required to be redacted, may take 16-20 hours or more of staff time for it to be suitable for release. In addition, with the rapid increase in this technology, there are often additional features, equipment, and costs in which departments have had to invest to reproduce this material, yet there is no way for these costs to be offset by reasonable fees.”

Providing a one-page accident report was simple in the past, but the videos can require special computer software and the ability to blur out the faces of minors.

But the state’s Freedom of Information Commission and the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut are concerned that citizens could be charged too much for public information that they have a right to obtain.

“The commission believes that any fee structure should be reasonable and that records should be provided at the least cost,” said Colleen Murphy, executive director and chief counsel of the FOI Commission. “The  fees should not impose an unnecessary financial barrier to obtaining access to public records to which the public is entitled.”

The ACLU agrees.

“The ability to shed sunlight on government action through open records requests is essential to holding police accountable and to preventing state-sanctioned discrimination, abuse, and mismanagement,” policy counsel Jess Zaccagnino told lawmakers in written testimony. “We believe this bill would stifle people’s accessibility to information they have a right to obtain by charging people fees for records created by police-worn body cameras and dashboard cameras. The public should never have to pay to access records kept by the government, and that includes recordings captured by police body and dashboard cameras.”

But Betsy Gara, executive director of the Council of Small Towns, supports the idea because towns are “facing substantial costs” in trying to comply with the law.

“In addition to storing and retrieving such recordings, public agencies must redact certain information from recordings prior to disclosure, such as images containing nudity and images of an identifiable minor,” Gara said in written testimony. “This may involve blurring or blocking out certain content or removing sound.”

The support for body cameras among police and the public has grown steadily over time. In 2015, the legislature’s public safety committee took the first steps by approving body cameras in a pilot program in three volunteer communities statewide after major clashes between police and individuals ranging from Ferguson, Mo., to Staten Island led to the deaths of Black men that became nationally known.[cq comment=”

At the time, then-Sen. Eric Coleman, a Bloomfield Democrat, raised concerns about images regarding sexual assaults that might be deemed by some as an invasion of personal privacy.

“One of my friends had a baby in the driveway, and if that was me, I would want the camera to be off,” Rep. Lezlye Zupkus, a Prospect Republican, said at the time.

Since police departments are independent in Connecticut, there has been a wide range of experiences with the cameras. Milford, for example, has had cameras since 2011, while officers in some other towns did not have cameras until relatively recently.

Christopher Keating can be reached at ckeating@courant.com